[tei-council] new formatting of web version of Guidelines

[James Cummings]

Syd Bauman wrote:
>> My main problem with them at the moment is that I find it really
>> hard to get my mind around the front matter being listed in the
>> right hand column "after" (in for a reader used to left-to-right
>> columns) the main text.
> 
> I have some sympathy for this concern. Not convinced either way, yet. 

If you resize your browser window and bring in the right-hand side of it, at 
some point you will notice the 'Back Matter' slip behind beneath the 'Front 
Matter'.  If you keep going, the Front matter will end up before the Text Body 
(which I think I really should rename 'Chapters', any disagreement?) and the 
'Back Matter' will end up beneath the Text Body.  Front, Text, Back is what the 
source looks like and that is honestly how it is displayed.  To have Them all in 
one column on the left-hand side means that you never see the (quite important) 
appendices because they are off the screen underneath the last few chapters. 
What we've done is float the Front Matter right, float the text body left, and 
the back matter right.  I experimented with floating the back matter right, but 
that honestly looked worse.

An alternative option would be to float all of the left, so that it went Front, 
Body in the middle and then Back.  When I attempted this it just looked weird to 
me to have short column, big column, short column.

Another option is to process them in a different order in the XSLT: back, body 
front, and float them the same way they are here.

We are already abusing html:table in other places for presentational purposes 
(though I've tried to convince Sebastian to change this) and so I'd like to 
avoid that if possible.

> However, I'm concerned that the granularity is too fine. The reader
> should be able to change the default for all declarations, rather
> than having to click on each individually. Is that possible now? If
> not, James & Sebastian, is it something that could be done in time?

I believe Sebastian 'has a plan' for something which might work.  Keep an eye on 
the -beta site over the next few weeks. ;-)

>> I find at the moment the section by section directories difficult
>> to get used to, but that's probably because they are still novel to
>> me.
> +1

Yes, the miniTOC navigation boxes are a bit strange, but it was felt better to 
have the navigation distinct from the text.  I'll assume that you've noticed 
that they vanish when you print/print-preview.

> The things that most urgently need work, IMHO, are the "Children"
> section of the tagdocs, and the sectioning of the Macros and Classes
> appendices.

Yes, as Syd knows since Sebastian consulted him when he was doing it, these were 
things which were left to the very end and so could probably use some 
improvement.  I think grouping the children by module rather than superscripting 
which module they are in would be better.  There is still some minor formatting 
tweaks to get the element reference tables to display almost identically in all 
browsers.

> Speaking of which, as there have been 2 "agrees" and no dissension,
> I've changed the name of Appendix C to "Datatypes and Other Macros".

If I'm not already one of those Agrees, then I certainly do.

-James
-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk